Stories of Muslim Reverts! - Post yours here!

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My Name Made Me Muslim



An American Medical Student Finds Islam


My name is Tarik Preston. I embraced the religion of Islam in 1988 at the age of 19.

The story of how I came to embrace Islam is not a very long story, and in many respects, I think that the story of how Allah (God) continued to guide me after I entered Islam is more of an inspiring story.​
Nevertheless, this story begins with my name. I was given the name Tarik at birth. In the 60s, the 70s, and even the 80s, it wasn't all that unusual for some Americans to give their children African names. Many times, the names they chose from Africa were actually Islamic names, which is what happened with my name.​
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I've been a muslim for 2 years now. I was a Christan before I became Muslim.
The reson why I converted to Islam was I was seeing Jesus (pbuh) more as a prophet and that he didn't die on the cross. I watched a tv program about islam and I really wanted to find out more. I begain to read more into Islam and started to belive in what muslim belived in. I started to come on here to find out more about islam. I met a muslim on here that was from my town. We met up and she took me to my local mosque where I said my shahadah.
Since becoming muslim, life has been hard for me. My family hasn't excepted me being muslim and really want me to go back to Christanity. I stand out in my town as there are hardly any muslims here.
 
Esther462 said:
Since becoming muslim, life has been hard for me. My family hasn't excepted me being muslim and really want me to go back to Christanity. I stand out in my town as there are hardly any muslims here.
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Assalamu Alikom sis.. May Allah make it easy for you.. Just remember how the prophet Mohammad (pbuh) and his companions faced hard times at the beginning of their Islam. Their families didn't accept their Islam exactly as yours. Loving Allah (swt) is what they lived for, and they were ready to face any difficulty and prevail it in the sake of Allah. Be strong dear, you'll insha'Allah have rewards that we (as born Muslims) may not have. Remember that Allah has guided you to the light which many people are deprived of. Remember that when we daily make doa's for all Muslims, you'r included. So, more than a billion of people are making do'as for you in every minute of your day!
You are following the right path, so be patient sis.. The difficulty will eases by the time insha'Allah.. Remember sis that there are many people who are facing difficulties in different issues, but you're facing difficulty in the most honorable thing.. It is Islam..

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Longing for the Paradise (Al-Jannah) where the endless happiness…
 
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Today an arabic woman say the shahada in my islamic center :statisfie.
Her story is short and unusual:
her mother is a Syrian Cristian ;her father is Druzi and her husband: Shiite.
She was not following any religion,but looking for the Truth...
And Subhan-Allah,she find it!
She is divorced now and join our big family :statisfie

Pls make du'a for her and her son,may Allah SUT guide him too!
 
Esther462 said:
I've been a muslim for 2 years now. I was a Christan before I became Muslim.
The reson why I converted to Islam was I was seeing Jesus (pbuh) more as a prophet and that he didn't die on the cross. I watched a tv program about islam and I really wanted to find out more. I begain to read more into Islam and started to belive in what muslim belived in. I started to come on here to find out more about islam. I met a muslim on here that was from my town. We met up and she took me to my local mosque where I said my shahadah.
Since becoming muslim, life has been hard for me. My family hasn't excepted me being muslim and really want me to go back to Christanity. I stand out in my town as there are hardly any muslims here.
Click to expand...

sis i have the same problem. my dad would love nothing more if i reverted back i know its bad but i avoid going to see my family now because my dad has pictures of idols and pictures of jesus pbuh on the wall been in the family for 50years and i once told my father to take it down i mean he dose not worship it and has not been religious since my mum died and he will not take it down so i don't see the point of it at all. an old irish tradition i suppose. my brothers slang me off and call me extremist. my older brother has a friend who left islam and now his family want to kill him so he had to flee his country so thats why my brother hates islam...theres no talking to him at all. he absorbs everything on the internet whats been said bad bout islam and he believes it to be a very evil religion so i tryed to give him some dawah and showed him vids on utube from what brothers had uploaded. i have not seen my family now in a while as i am living far away
 
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From Cocktail Pub to Islam



Satellite


By Hassan Isilow, IOL Correspondent

"Now I have a good relationship with my family, friends and Allhamdullilah I’m living a healthier life as a result of Islam," Laura told IOL.

http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/...45766133&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout
 
Esther462 said:
I've been a muslim for 2 years now. I was a Christan before I became Muslim.
The reson why I converted to Islam was I was seeing Jesus (pbuh) more as a prophet and that he didn't die on the cross. I watched a tv program about islam and I really wanted to find out more. I begain to read more into Islam and started to belive in what muslim belived in. I started to come on here to find out more about islam. I met a muslim on here that was from my town. We met up and she took me to my local mosque where I said my shahadah.
Since becoming muslim, life has been hard for me. My family hasn't excepted me being muslim and really want me to go back to Christanity. I stand out in my town as there are hardly any muslims here.
Click to expand...


Salaam. May Allah show you mercy. There's an authentic hadeeth which says that when Allah wants to do good to a person, He gives them hardship to purify them so that on the day of judgment you will never have to experience hardship again. Meaning He hurries the hardship for you in this life so that on the day of judgment wherein a lot of people will experience hardship, you will be spared from it.

linus

http://linuses.blogspot.com
 
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A Have It Your Way Believer

The Story of an American Christian Convert

By Gabriel Eckerson

He liked to do things his own way. He practiced his own version of Christianity, then he ended up… Read more.


....A couple years ago, as a Christian, I decided not to pray or sing to Jesus anymore. I was still a Christian. But whenever a song at church was directed to praising or worshiping Jesus, my mouth was closed. Isn't this anti-Christian? No. It is pro-Christian!

Worshiping God, our Father, alone, was Jesus' directive. He led us to worship the Father. Never did he direct praise upon himself nor instruct anyone to pray to him. This is how I came to the conclusion to only worship the Father.

Another point was when Jesus said people's sins were forgiven. I couldn't find any spot where Jesus said that he himself forgave anyone of their sins. Even John the Baptist told people when their sins were forgiven.

full story here :

http://www.readingislam.com/servlet...gename=Zone-English-Discover_Islam/DIESection
 
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I know the reversion story below is a bit long but I really admire the sisters patience and thought I would share it.
(Really sorry if this story has already been posted) :hiding:

Aminah assilmi is a renowned female scholar of Islam she travels around the United States to give lectures , her personal story has admired hundreds of individuals ,she is also President of International Union of Muslim Women , the organization that has many achievements under its belt.

"I am so very glad that I am a Muslim. Islam is my life. Islam is the beat of my heart. Islam is the blood that courses through my veins. Islam is my strength. Islam is my life so wonderful and beautiful. Without Islam I am nothing, and should Allah ever turn His magnificent face from me, I could not survive." Aminah Assilmi

It all started with a computer glitch.

She was a Southern Baptist girl, a radical feminist, and a broadcast journalist. She was a girl with an unusual caliber, who excelled in school, received scholarships, ran her own business, and were competing with professionals and getting awards – all these while she was going to college. Then one day a computer error happened that made her take up a mission as a devout Christian. Eventually, however, it resulted into something opposite and changed her life completely around.

It was 1975 when for the first time computer was used to pre-register for a class in her college. She was working on her degree on Recreation. She pre-registered for a class and then went to Oklahoma City to take care of a business. Her return was delayed and she came back to college two weeks into the class. Making up the missed work was no problem for her, but she was surprised to find that the computer mistakenly registered her for a Theatre class, a class where students would be required to perform in front of others. She was a very reticent girl and she was horrified to think about performing in front of others. She could not drop the class for it was too late

Failing the class was also not a choice, for she was receiving a scholarship that was paying for her tuition and receiving an ‘F’ would have jeopardized it.

Advised by her husband, she went to her teacher to work out some other alternative to performing, such as preparing costumes, etc. Assured by the teacher that he would try to help her, she went to the next class and was shocked by what she saw. The class was full of Arabs and “camel jockeys”. That was enough for her. She came back home and decided not to go back to the class anymore. It was not possible for her to be in the middle of Arabs. “There was no way I was going to sit in a room full of dirty heathens!”

Her husband was calm as usual. He pointed out to her that God has a reason for everything and that she should think about more before quitting. Besides, there was the scholarship that was paying her tuition. She went behind locked doors for 2 days to think about. When she came out, she decided to continue the class. She felt that God gave her a task to convert the Arabs into Christianity.

Thus she found herself with a mission to accomplish. Throughout the class, she would be discussing Christianity with her Arab classmates. “I proceeded to explain to them how they would burn in the fires of hell for all eternity, if they did not accept Jesus as their personal savior. They were very polite, but did not convert. Then, I explained how Jesus loved them and had died on the cross to save them from their sins. All they had to do was accept him into their hearts.” They still did not convert, and so she decided to do something else: “I decided to read their own book to show to them that Islam was a false religion and Mohammed was a false Prophet”.

At her request, one student gave her a copy of the Qur’an and another book on Islam. With these two books she started on her research, which she was to continue for the next one and half years. She read the Qur’an fully and another fifteen books on Islam. Then she came back to the Qur’an and re-read it. During her research, she started taking notes that she found objectionable and which she would be able to use to prove that Islam was a false religion.

Unconsciously, however, she was changing from within which did not escape the attention of her husband. “I was changing, just in little ways but enough to bother him. We used to go to the bar every Friday and Saturday, or to a party, and I no longer wanted to go. I was quieter and more distant.” She stopped drinking and eating pork. Her husband suspected her of having an affair with another man, for “it was only for a man that a woman changes”. Ultimately, she was asked to leave, and she soon found herself living in a separate apartment

"When I first started to study Islam, I did not expect to find anything that I needed or wanted in my personal life. Little did I know that Islam would change my life. No human could have ever convinced me that I would finally be at peace and overflowing with love and joy because of Islam."

Throughout these times, she continued studying Islam and although she was changing subtly from within, she remained a devout Christian. Then one day, there was a knock on her door. It was a man in traditional Muslim robe, who appeared to her as a “man in a long white night gown with a red and white checkered table cloth on his head”. His name was Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheik and he was accompanied by three other men in similar dress. She was very offended by Muslim men coming to her in nightgowns and pajamas. She was further shocked when Abdul-Aziz told her that he understood that she waited to be a Muslim. She replied that she was a Christian and she did not have any plan to become a Muslim. However, she had some questions to ask if they had the time.

At her invitation, they came inside. She now brought up the questions and objections that she noted down while she was researching. “I will never forget his name”, she said of Abdul-Aziz who proved to be a very patient and soft-mannered person. “He was very patient and discussed every question with me. He never made me feel silly or that a question was stupid.” Abdul-Aziz listened to every question and objection and explained it within the proper context. “He explained that Allah had told us to seek knowledge and questions were one of the ways to accomplish that. When he explained something, it was like watching a rose open – petal by petal, until it reached its full glory. When I told him that I did not agree with something and why, he always said I was correct up to a point. Then he would show me how to look deeper and from different directions to reach a fuller understanding.”

It would not be long before she would externally submit to what she had already been submitting to internally during the last one and half years. Later in that same day, this Southern Baptist girl would declare in front of Abdul-Aziz and his companions: “I bear witness that there is no god but God and Mohammed is His Messenger.” It was May 21, 1977.

Conversion to Islam, or to any other religion for that matter, is not always a simple thing to do. Except for a few fortunate ones, a new Muslim usually face consequences. The convert may face isolation from family and friends, if not pressure to go back to the family faith. Sometimes, a convert may even face sever economic hardship, as in the case of those who are asked to leave the house because of converting to Islam. Some converts are fortunate to continue to be well respected by family and friends, but most of them face minor to severe hardship especially during the first few years after the conversion.

But the difficulty that Aminah Assilimi had to go through and the sacrifice that she had to make for the sake of her conviction and faith is almost unheard of. There are few who could rely so much on Allah as she did, standing firm and meeting the challenges, making sacrifices, and yet maintaining a positive posture and influencing people around with the beauty of what she found and believed in.

She lost most of her friends, for she was “no fun anymore”. Her mother did not accept her becoming a Muslim and hoped that it was a temporary zeal and that she would soon grow out of it. Her “mental health expert” sister thought that she lost her mind. She attempted to put her in a mental health institution.

Her father was a calm and wise man. People would come to him for advice and he could comfort anyone in distress. But when he heard that his daughter became a Muslim, he loaded his double-barrel shotgun and started on his way to kill her. “It is better that she be dead rather than suffering in the deepest of Hell”, he said.

She was now without friends and without family.

She soon started wearing hijab. The day she put it on, she was denied her job. She was now without family, friends, and job. But her greatest sacrifice was yet to come.

She and her husband both loved each other very much. But while she was studying Islam, her husband misunderstood her for her apparent changes. She became quieter and stopped going to the bar. Her changes were visible to him and he suspected her of having affair with another man, for whom she must have been changing. She could not explain to him what was happening. “There was no way to make him understand what was changing me because I did not know.” Eventually he asked her to leave and she started living separately.

After she openly accepted Islam, it went worse. A divorce was now inevitable. This was a time when Islam was little known, much less understood for what it is. She had two little children whom she loved dearly and whose custody should have rightfully be given to her. But in a grave violation of justice, she was denied their custody just because she became a Muslim. Before giving the formal verdict, the judge offered her a harsh choice: either renounce Islam and get custody of the children, or keep Islam and leave the children. She was given 20 minutes to make a decision.

She loved her children very dearly. It is perhaps the worst nightmare that a mother can have: asked to willfully leave her child - not for one day, month, or year, but forever. On the other hand, how could she keep the Truth away from her children and live as a hypocrite? “It was the most painful 20 minutes in my life”, she said in an interview. Those of us who are mothers and fathers, especially of young children, little imagination is needed to feel the pain and torment that she must have passed every second in those 20 minutes. What added further to her pain was that according to doctors, she could never bear another child because of certain complications. “I prayed like I had never done before … I knew that there was no safer place for my children to be than in the hands of Allah. If I denied Him, there would be no way in the future to show my children the wonders of being with Allah.”

She decided to retain Islam. Her two dear children – one little boy and one little girl – were taken away from her and given to her ex-husband.

For a mother, is there a sacrifice greater than this – a sacrifice that is done for no material reason but only for faith and conviction?

“I left the court knowing that life without my babies would be very difficult. My heart bled, even though I knew, inside, I had done the right thing” . She found comfort in the following verse of the Qur'an:

There is no god but He,-the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there can intercede in His presence except as He permitteth? He knoweth what (appeareth to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He willeth. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feeleth no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory). (Quran 2: 255)

Perhaps the air of Colorado was too thin for justice. Or perhaps there was a plan in Allah’s greater scheme of affairs. Aminah Assilimi later fought back and took her case to the media. Although she did not get custody of her children again, a change was made in the Colorado law that one cannot be denied child custody on the basis of his or her religion.

Indeed Allah’s love and mercy engulfed her so much that, as if, she has been granted the touchstone of Islam. Wherever she goes, people are touched by her beautiful words and Islamic manners and become Muslim.

By accepting Islam, she became a changed person, and a much better person. So much so that her family, relatives, and people around her started appreciating her mannerism and the faith that brought about such changes in her. Despite her family’s initial reaction, she remained in touch with them and addressed them with respect and humility, just as the Qur’an enjoins the Muslims to do. She would send cards to her parents on different occasions, but she would always write down a verse from the Qur’an or the Hadith without mentioning the source of such beautiful words of wisdom. It was not long before she started making a positive influence among her family members.

The first to become Muslim was her grand mother. She was over 100 years old. Soon after accepting Islam, she died. “The day she pronounced Shahada, all her misdeeds had been erased, while her good deeds were preserved. She died so soon after accepting Islam that I knew her “book” was bound to be heavy on the good side. It fills me with such a joy!”

Next to become Muslim was her father, the one who wanted to kill her after she became Muslim. Thus he brought alive the story of Umar ibn Khattab. Umar was a companion of the Prophet who persecuted the early Muslims before he converted to Islam. When he heard one day that his sister became a Muslim, he went out with an open sword to kill her. But upon hearing some of the verses from the Qur’an that his sister was reciting, he recognized the truth and went straight to the Prophet and accepted Islam.

Two years after she (Assilmi) accepted Islam, her mother called and said that she appreciated her faith and hoped that she would keep it. Couple of years later, she called again and asked her about what one would need to do to become a Muslim. Assilmi replied that one had to believe that there is only One God and Muhammad was his Messenger. “Any fool knows that. But what do you have to do?”, she asked again. She replied that if that is what she believed, then she was already a Muslim! At this, her mother said, “Well … OK. But let’s not tell your father just yet”.

She was not aware that her husband (Assilmi’s step father) had the same conversation with her a few weeks earlier. Thus the two lived together as Muslims for years in secret without knowing that the other was also a Muslim. Her sister who wanted to put her in mental institution accepted Islam as well. She must have realized that becoming Muslim is indeed the most healthy and sound thing to do.

Her son, upon becoming adult, accepted Islam. When he turned 21, he called her and said that he wanted to become a Muslim.

Sixteen years after the divorce, her ex-husband also accepted Islam. He said that he had been watching her for sixteen years and wanted his daughter to have the same religion that she had. He came to her and apologized for what he had done. He was a very nice gentlemen and Assilimi had forgiven him long ago.

Perhaps the greatest reward for her was yet to come. Assilmi later married another person, and despite the doctors’ verdict that she could never conceive another child, Allah blessed her with a beautiful boy. If Allah (swt) makes a gift to someone, who can prevent Him? It was truly a wonderful blessing from Allah (swt), and so she named him “Barakah

The sacrifice that Assilmi made for the sake of Allah (swt) was tremendous. And so Allah (swt) turned in mercy to her and rewarded her with enormous blessings. Her family discarded her after she accepted Islam, and now by Allah’s mercy, most of them are Muslim. She lost her friends because of Islam, and now she is being loved by so many. “Friends who loved came out of nowhere”, she said. Allah’s blessings came upon her so much that wherever she goes people are touched by the beauty of Islam and accept the Truth. Both Muslims and non-Muslims now come to her for advice and counseling.

She lost her job because of wearing hijab, and now she is the President of the International Union of Muslim Women. She delivers lectures nationwide and is on high demand. It was her organization that successfully lobbied for the “Eid Stamp” and had it approved by the United States Postal Service, but it took many years of work. She is now working on making the Eid Day as a national holiday.

She has tremendous trust on Allah’s love and mercy and she never looses faith on Him. She was once diagnosed with cancer some years ago. Doctors said that it was in an advanced stage and that she would live for another year. But her faith in Allah (swt) remained strong. “We must all die. I was confident that the pain I was experiencing contained blessings.” As a brilliant example of how much one can love Allah, she mentions about a friend of her named Kareem Al-Misawi who died of cancer when he was in his 20’s:

"Shortly before he died, he told me that Allah was truly Merciful. This man was in unbelievable anguish and was radiating with Allah’s love. He said: “Allah intends that I should enter heaven with a clean book.” His death experience gave me something to think about. He taught me of Allah’s love and mercy."

All praise is due to Allah, she continues to live in good health. She now thinks that having cancer was the greatest blessing that she ever had.
 
For the first seventeen years of my life, give or take a crisis of faith here and a definitely temporary period of apostasy there, I was a die hard Christian. It peaked starting when I was fifteen. I transferred to a Christian high school and there I excelled in my theology classes the whole way through, getting invariable straight A’s in all of my theology classes and, to the best of my knowledge and memory, never ceasing to be at the top of them at any time during my three odd years at that school for longer than the duration of about a week or two—and even then only once or twice that I knew of. I even got a special award at one of the year end annual dinners for my eschatology. I went to church every week and was in the church’s youth group. Often I read from the Bible for my own pleasure and I just couldn’t get enough of C.S. Lewis’s theology and William Barclay’s exegesis.

And then one day I literally just woke up knowing I didn’t want to be a Christian anymore. I awakened with the profound, out-of-the-blue desire to convert to Islam (or revert, if you will—I always feel like groaning at that inconsequential, purely semantic squabble). I had no idea what had happened, and it was all so shockingly sudden and contrary to everything I thought I could be certain of regarding myself that I was, quite frankly, fairly terrified. Well, wouldn’t you be? I couldn’t begin to fathom what had happened or especially how it had happened in such a bushwhacking manner. It’s not like I’d had a visionary dream the night before or anything: I think I would have remembered it. I just woke up one day and found I was feeling almost irresistibly drawn to abandon my religion for another I knew virtually nothing about and had not previously felt any real attraction to. I had read a few surahs out of Rashad Khalifa’s translation of the Koran (this was before I had read enough of Khalifa’s irrational teachings to result in my losing my interest in him), and while it had struck me that there was something fascinating about them (for want of a better word), they had not really enticed me, let alone tempted me. I hadn’t even been thinking about them much. What on earth was going on?!

While I still cannot explain where the seemingly spontaneously generated pull toward Islam I found myself waking up with that morning came from (apart from the obvious explanation that I was inspired), in retrospect I see that at least the “losing my faith in Christianity” part doesn’t seem so surprising or implausible as it did at the time. It may have been inevitable that I’d become surely disillusioned by Christianity eventually—but who’d have thought it would have happened like that?? Not that I’d then had any real inkling--at least consciously--that anything of the sort was going during all that time. Every layer of my faith in Christianity had sort of been gradually eroding all at once for many months, though slowly enough and/or easily enough to suppress that I wouldn’t know it until it was too late that the structure atop the foundation was already starting to crumble, let alone come crashing down all at once with another structure materializing, pretty much out of nowhere, to rise in its place. (The reasons for my rejecting Christianity will be the subject of a future article, God willing, and I’ve already written much about them in other articles, both at my site and on message boards. Even to summarize it all would derail this article too much, and this article is already bound to end up longer than I’d like for it to be.)

On the day that I woke up finding that I wanted to be a Muslim, I obtained a copy of A.J. Arberry’s highly renowned translation The Koran Interpreted (which I still prefer and use to this very day). What wonders this Book had! In fact, it seemed to have a little bit of everything. That in it which did not match my existing theological theories only replaced them with something more logical, and alone amongst all the world’s scriptures it actually concerned itself, most all the way through, with establishing its doctrines logically. I didn’t just follow the usual “because I said so” rationale of most supposed religious revelations. It offered sound arguments for why you should believe the things it said. It even had an air of scholarliness about it, citing sources, referring you to external sources, discouraging baseless conjecture, anticipating and refuting arguments, detailing everything to a tee…I had never seen anything like it, nor anticipated that there ever could be anything like it. And above all it seemed so complete somehow, as though it covered every base and subject in such a short amount of text. Divine conciseness (if that doesn’t sound silly). Everything under the sun squeezed into a thimble. What else would one expect from a revelation by a perfect being?

I was dazzled by it all. I didn’t think this book could be anything other than what it claimed to be: the real word of God.

Unfortunately for me, when after a while practicing Islam doubts started forming in my head (most of them silly or ignorant on retrospect), there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it—or rather, it would probably be more honest or accurate to say that I was at a relative disadvantage in terms of doing anything about it compared to most Muslims but didn’t bother to take the necessary extra steps to ensure the loss of my faith. At the time there wasn’t much of a Muslim community where I live (Arkansas, which is known as “the buckle of the Bible belt”—here in Little Rock you can’t swing your head without seeing a Baptist church). The only mosque in the area was a small one run mostly by an explosive, unpleasant, closed-minded, and (even when not giving a sermon) infuriatingly long-winded imam. I didn’t yet know what I needed to look for on the internet either. I didn’t personally know any fellow Muslims. (I was still going to the Christian high school.) So I went about with these things stewing in my head. How could people be sent to hell forever over a matter of what they believed, as if incorrectness were a vice, let alone a ****able one? How could people be sent to hell forever period? Burning someone forever is giving them an infinite punishment for a finite crime. Why does a woman only get half the amount of inheritance as a man? And so on.

The magnificent voice speaking throughout the Koran turned sour somehow in my head when I read now, by this point merely seeming nothing more than the whining voice of a spoiled brat, complaining about how people didn’t appreciate him and how sorry they would be when he gave lollipops to his friends but not to them. I became an apostate yet again, this time from a religion never even thought I’d join in the first place.

All right, I figured, Christianity was down and Islam was down. Were there any religions out there I could believe in? I started looking into various ones in an attempt to find the answer. First I looked at Taoism, but was not impressed by the Tao Te Ching one little bit. It seemed pointlessly dense, the kind of thing people found meaning and wisdom in only because they were looking for it and read it subjectively into the total nonsense of the text, much like with Nostradamus’s prophecies. Next I looked into Buddhism, and even went so far as to briefly try it out, sort of, though I never truly joined, and within months if not weeks gave up even bothering. I had meditated and gone vegetarian, read The Dhammapada and other scriptural bits and pieces, read many books on Buddhism, and visited many websites of the same ilk…and all to no avail, because the very underlying premises of the religion were what didn’t jibe with me. All life is depicted using a negative description in the very first part of the very first of the religions’ central tenets. To focus a whole religion on devoting our efforts to escaping or advancing beyond the good world we live in struck—and still strikes—me as unrealistically pessimistic about this world. It’s a place to be enjoyed and appreciated, not a springboard for your personal advancement. And worst of all, for me, was the religion’s strict denial (or at best, horridly erroneous redefinition and re-evaluated significance) of good and evil.

By this point I was getting tired of religion altogether, so I gave it up completely. (I was jumping the gun again, I know, but what can I say? What’s done is done.) I was starting to observe that the world’s religions, it seemed, grew out of and into each other like hedge animals on opposite sides of a yard with no fence. They shouldn’t have been allowed to grow so wild, and apart from taking different shapes they were all essentially the same, the only significance to said shapes being what people saw in them from their own individual perspective, when in reality the hedges were each just one more of the world’s natural growths. And now that I thought of it, shouldn’t I be wondering whether even any of the seeds of ideas out of which they grew were genuine, the underlying ideas like the existence of God? I looked at some atheistic websites and found that their arguments and counter-arguments regarding God’s existence looked pretty sound. They have an unusual amount of sophistry to many people, and somehow I had become one of them, though on reflection all I can do is wonder how it happened. For instance, atheistic spokesperson Michael Martin seemed to me at the time a paragon of human reasoning whose faculties I could probably never hope to aspire to. Now I look at his writings and I can’t figure out what I ever saw in them. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking deeply enough and let my cynicism with religion motivate me to intellectual sloth; perhaps my own reasoning faculties were either temporarily blinded or less developed than they are now…oh well. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.

The sophistry (lucky for me) wore off after a while, though gradually: the more I actually studied and thought about the atheistic writings I’d read in the atheism vs. theism debate, the flimsier and flimsier I started to realize that their arguments and counter-arguments were. In fact, most of the counter-argumentation to arguments for God’s existence consist either of horrendously shameful and obvious straw man depictions of the theistic arguments in question (for instance, the brazen, insulting claim that people positing the teleological argument from natural law for God’s existence are somehow dumb enough to be confusing the two blatantly distinct meanings of “lawgiver” just because we may be happening to be using that already existing word) or else mere diversions posing as real arguments like the classic ploy of answering a question with another question (like “if God created the world, what created God?”), which even if they did work still did diddley squat in terms of actually addressing the issue of God’s existence. And most of the arguments against God’s existence tended to be of the same nature. What almost all of them boil down to in the end, from the classic Argument from Evil/Suffering to the more recent atheistic cosmological arguments, is the mere question, “Why would God do/not do that?” It’s all but impossible to know for certain why another human being, or often even our own selves, does something, so how on earth can they expect the theist to know the motives of a being like God? And of course any admitted failure to answer will often get the label “mystery appeal” slapped on it, a stunning case of the pot calling the kettle black.

At first the full import of all these fallacies did not strike me. I just left it that most atheistic scholars were incompetent (not to mention how so many of them were nasty and childish, tending to replace argumentation with insults and mockery—why atheists wonder why there are such terrible stereotypes about them when so many of them are perpetuating those unfortunate stereotypes themselves with their behavior, often in the very same breath?). They certainly seemed to me somehow to always miss what I thought were the more obvious and valid responses to theists in their debates and go for the more predictable route instead. (Then again, atheistic scholars and spokespeople are, I was discovering, often by and large possibly the most predictable group of people in all of intellectualism.) Eventually I would come to realize that the rebuttals I had in my own head weren’t all that much better.

The thought process that really started to take me out of my blinded atheistic state, though, began upon my reflection of something I read in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. That book, as I interpreted it (so far as I ended up reading) seemed to be envisaging a world wherein nothing was totally predictable and there were no true opposites or absolutes—in short, a world of hidden yet still somehow evident chaos. Could the virtual nihilism, I wondered, have anything to it? After all, my faith in just about everything I’d once believed in was gone, and on some level I was already doubting even my atheism. I pondered the matter and found that no matter how one looked at it, the world was built on apparent absolutes, some of which—the mathematical ones—basic sense itself confirmed must be real. But what were these mathematical and physical “forces” and “principles” and “properties” really? After all, those are all just words, and it seems quite impossible to come up with a definition for them which is both non-circular and full enough to be at all satisfactory or illuminating.

As a matter of fact, I thought, weren’t these “forces” (quotation marks seem only proper, if you think about it) of nature and all too close to the old time “gods” for comfort? Both were, it seemed evident, meaningless terms that supposedly described nebulous,
transcendental things which controlled everything even though they seemed nowhere to be found in physical reality itself. In olden times when someone dropped a rock and it automatically fell to the earth, people might have, say, explained the gravity as “the spirits” carrying it down; now they say it’s “a force of nature” carrying it down. Wasn’t it just the substitution of one cop-out disguised as a real answer for another? Was there any substantial difference between the so-called rational explanations for natural phenomena which science, as seen through the lens of atheism or hard materialism, proposed, and supernatural ones, or for that matter, no actual explanation at all?

Well, then, could we at least define these “forces” operationally, in terms of actual definition and explanation as opposed to mere scientific description? They were, of course, a select few implements by which patterns emerged and things were organized and took shape, and out of those patterns greater patterns of the same sort yet arose, and out of those more, and so on. Much like the twelve possible musical notes when made into a symphony. It was like the world is a great arabesque and its laws were the shaping tools through which it was formed. The structure, organization, mechanism, and intricacy of the world could hardly be denied, regardless of what Nietzsche or others may have thought. And when you consider the question of where these shaping principles come from, why and how they exist, it’s not unreasonable to think that they do that for a greater and higher reason.

No wonder the atheists failed more in refuting teleological arguments for God’s existence, most particularly and spectacularly with their failures at refuting the argument from natural law, than with any other theistic argument. No wonder they argued so poorly in debates, even in those which some might say they’d won. No wonder all that I thought I knew about atheism’s supposedly rational stances on things was proving to be all smoke and mirrors in my head (and often, objectively as well). These people simply didn’t have a single leg to stand on. It was quite likely after all that a higher power had designed the world.

So by this point I still rejected all religion yet saw that the universe had a cosmic designer who seemed to make the laws of the universe and kick-start the Big Bang or whatever with them to guide it—basically, as in the old “clockmaker” idea of the founding fathers. This, it quickly enough occurred to me, was deism writ large. So I fairly avidly took up the mantle of a deist for many months, often thinking with amazement how many if not most of my fellow Americans were deists even though they don’t even know what the word—and how so many of them also believed the popular lie, spread all too much by politicians, certain prominent Christian apologists, and other dishonest or ignorant folks, that America was founded by Christians even though most of the founding fathers were deists (though, to be fair, a rather large minority were Presbyterians, or so I’ve heard).

As the months I spent in my deism went by, a pattern slowly began to emerge in my views and my discussions about religion: I started to find, surprisingly, that I still had relatively very few bad things to say about Islam even though I despised religion in general. For a while this didn’t really bother me. Then one day, bored and brooding in anti-religious frustration I decided to write a long paper going over the flaws I perceived to exist in all the major religions, especially the ones which seemed to be unanimous among all of them. I still had my old copy of Arberry’s translation handy (which I still do, and I still read from it to this day) so I started with Islam.

I remember there’s a line from that terrible sequel to The Neverending Story which goes something like, “Books change when you read them for a second time.” That had often been the case with me, yet never like this. It was though the Koran I now in my hands was somehow not the same book I remembered at all. There were all sorts of things in it I found which it seemed I hadn’t known were even there despite my having read the whole thing in its entirety during my first time as a Muslim. I mean, confound it, the thing even gave teleological arguments like the argument from natural law (Koran 16:79, 6:95-99, etc.)!

This book was no petulant, bossy, bullying rant indeed; rather it was dry, intellectual, sophisticated, yet still passionate and emotive. It even criticized the problems infesting so many other religions as well as those of wrong-thinking religious folk of any stripe—including that great bane of religion—and, really, of all human life and culture—that is the ingrained, unthinking parroting of the beliefs you were brought up with at the behest of reason and reasonability. I also started to discover (and would continue to discover, long after I reverted) that when it came to all the tough abstract theological or philosophical questions which the very people of most religions have trouble answering satisfactorily, the Koran always seemed to be a source for the dead-on answer to all of them. What is the precise definition of God and His nature? He’s defined in detail by ninety-nine sensible descriptive titles. Where are heaven and hell? They are nowhere because they don’t exist yet, and won’t until God tears down the world and remakes it come Judgment Day. Why are we here? To serve God. An answer so simple, obvious, and obviously right—downright self-evident by definition, when you consider the question, and from a theistic point of view—that all the great minds which have approached the question through the ages were put to shame. It’s the cosmological equivalent of, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” “To get to the other side.”

And somehow, even now that I no longer believed in the Koran’s descriptions of heaven and hell, they still managed to captivate my emotions like I never would have thought possible—descriptively, they were the most joyful, comforting, inspired poetic radiance, and the most fundamentally disturbing depictions of torture, agony, and horror ever communicated. As if by the perfect poet. The kind of thing you would only expect from a God-inspired text….

At around the same time as my aborted attempt to write that paper (a little afterward, I think, though it could conceivably have happened beforehand), I ended up writing another one for real, though this time not for my own reasons. A friend of mine made a proposition to me in one of our instant messaging conversations. He had to write a three-page paper on Islam for one of his classes, the assignment was due the next day, and he knew zilch about the religion but remembered that I had been a practitioner years before. If I would write his paper for him, he said, he’d give me some of his marijuana in exchange. Although even then I wasn’t ordinarily a dishonest fellow I took the deal so as to help out a pal and get my hands on some weed free of charge. (By that point I had been experimenting with drugs for a few months.) I wrote the paper for him, and in doing so I naturally had found the subject of Islam once more in my thoughts. It didn’t help either that afterward I kept hearing references to the religion. I wanted to stop thinking about it. By this time I was a little paranoid about changing my stance on religion and adopting a new belief about it again, especially if it involved actually sinking so low (as I still thought of it) as to join or rejoin one of those awful religions of the world. I had changed my mind on these matters far too many times already and feared that if it happened again there would perhaps be no hope for permanent consistency for me left for the remainder of my days. Besides, hadn’t I learned from my mistakes? Shouldn’t I?

I wanted to settle things once and for all so I wrote down a list of objections to Islam and decided to take them to the religion’s practitioners and apologists. I acted as though I thought there was a serious chance that they could persuade me to come back to the religion though in my heart of hearts my only real reason was because I fully expected to be met with only the flimsy rationalizations—pardon me, “harmonizations”—and fallacy-drenched thought I had come to expect of all religious apologetics, perhaps partly just because that’s how Christian apologetics tend to go, but also because since I was convinced that no religion was correct, therefore only fallacies and poor excuses and explanations were even possible, just as a corollary. I was positively flabbergasted when I found that some of the answers I received were perfectly rational explanations supported by scriptural doctrine, common sense, and even ethics. (The Koran itself tells you outright in certain verses like 2:286 that God does not punish people just for making mistakes; hell is not, in Islamic doctrine, necessarily eternal; the women in the laws set by the Koranic code for the people at the time were never the providers of their family (as tradition and our own male/female biological instincts support anyway) and so their inheritance was free spending money whereas their husbands as the providers would naturally need more; and so on.) The rest of it I kind of managed to figure out on my own when I scrutinized my objections and their responses in desperation. I had nothing left to stand on but my own stubborn insistence not to jump the gun again.

I stuck around on some of the Islamic message boards on which I had been talking to people and after a while, despite my reluctance to come back to the religion, I found myself already behaving like I was always on Islam’s side already and taking up defense of it against the non-Muslims at the site who criticized or attacked it. This was too much for me, so as one last desperate ploy I decided to go through the Koran methodically from the book’s start to its finish re-assessing everything I saw in it. I had decided to be fair in my approach, but I was still really looking for a flaw more than anything else. When I reread the first surah, I saw no flaws but instead only the perfect prayer it was. When I reread the second surah and remarked on how shrewd and fitting its laws were. By the time I’d finished the ninth surah, well, that was certainly enough. I didn’t think I even had to finish rereading the whole thing. (And after reverting I would find yet more reasons still to believe.)

It culminated late one night in October 2003, I think around 4:00 A.M. I had been sitting at the computer desk, struggling in a sort of pre-Islamic jihad to make the right decision. I’d already typed out my announcement of re-reversion or whatever you’d like to call it, the cursor was over the “send message” icon, and all I had to do was click the mouse button. When I made the decision to go ahead and do it, finally accepting fully that this the only self-honest option left to me, something happened which shocked me and I think even made me quite flinch. It was the most profound experience of my life, and I still wish I could have it over again. At the very infinitesimal instant after I’d made up my mind, well before my brain had time to send the nerve impulse to my fingers to click the mouse button, I felt something I can only attempt to describe. It wasn’t a “religious experience” in the same sense that everyone always means by it, where they see a vision or feel something intuitively and/or emotionally. It wasn’t something I even felt at all in any existing sense of the word, unless it was the spiritual equivalent, at a billion times the speed, of feeling the pus ooze out of you when you’re draining it from a wound in warm water. The best way I can put, or even understand, what happened, is to say that whenever we commit a sin it leaves in your soul a…I don’t know what word would be best and none really fit…stain? Tarnish? Gunk? Residue? Corruption? Tumor? Filth? Grit? I could go on, but maybe the simple term “impurity” is best…and the instant I decided to embrace Islam, this time for good and all, all that spiritual gunk got…once again, I don’t know how to put it…yanked? Ripped? Sucked? Plucked? “Yanked” seems best, I suppose….

All of the sin-stains in my soul got YANKED out of me with a suddenness, quickness, completeness and perfection, and above all PURE FORCE that could only be called unimaginably superhuman. It left me feeling deliriously, deliciously pristine and emptied. Purified and relieved like I can’t tell you. It does seem to connect to certain Islamic doctrines—the belief that when you sincerely convert, all of your past sins are immediately forgiven; Koranic mentionings of purification of the elect being one of God’s big prizes and of sin “rusting on the heart”, so it may come as no surprise to you that I’m far from the only Muslim who’s had this exact same experience. What is definitely surprising is that I didn’t yet know anyone else ever had, and later heard of many other completely independent cases of the same thing. We Muslims don’t know it’s happened to anyone else yet it still sometimes happens to us, and this phenomenon doesn’t seem to exist with any other religion. I dare anyone to explain that.

Anyway, out of penance for my apostasy as well as simple justice (I could never really pay back God for bringing me back home from of my quite possibly ****ing inexcusable apostasy when I had unfairly abandoned Him, so I can only do all I can in exchange for as long as I remain), I pledged to Allah that for the rest of my life I would do what I could, if He willed, to help guide people to come to or stay on the true path of His religion, as He had guided me. That’s about all there is to say and my prediction of this turning out to be a longer article than I would have liked has come true, so I guess that’s all she wrote (or maybe I should say the rest is yet to be history).
 

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